


When Good Guys Lose

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Marauders' Era, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-22
Updated: 2009-11-22
Packaged: 2019-01-19 22:15:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12419358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: Sirius comes to realize that one lost battle can cause a bit of a change in perspective.





	When Good Guys Lose

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

**Author's note:** the idea came to me and refused to leave me alone until I wrote it. so I did. Hopefully, I didn't mess up the tenses.  

~*~*~   


**When Good Guys Lose**

So the story goes – where there is a good guy, there is a bad guy. That is a fact of life. In every movie, every book, every story, there is the one who must prevail and the one who must fail. There is the hero with the righteous cause, he fights to defend it and he wins, always. You cannot argue with that logic, for you cannot tell any tale in a different way. The good guy always wins, doesn't he?

And yet, he thinks sourly, they fought, and they lost. The Order had come to defend its righteous cause, its members had fought savagely, with no regard to anything but that single motivation, and they lost lives and were forced to retreat. They lost friends, they lost family, and when they thought they could not suffer any more losses – they fled. 

He cannot help but think they are the good guys in this horrid story, written in his friends' blood. He left the dark side in this screeching symphony, constructed from his friends' screams, to join forces with the light side. He did it because they are the good guys, and the good guy always wins. But the Order lost this battle, he knows they will lose many more to come, and he is ashamed to feel the earth shake a little underneath his feet. 

"All right, Padfoot?" James inquires as he brings him a glass of water.

Sirius cracks one eye open, then shakes his head slowly. He lets out one shuddering breath as he reaches for the glass James is offering him. 

"It's not right, you know. It's not supposed to go like this."

James arches one eyebrow as he sits down on the couch next to him.

"What's not supposed to go like this?" he asks, stifling a yawn.

"The story, our story, it's not right," Sirius mutters, eyes fixed on the ceiling, his head against the wall. "The good guy, he always wins."

"That he does," James agrees, and they both fall silent for a time.

"We lost," Sirius says, in a tone that implies he believes he is stating the obvious.

"Did we?"

"We ran."

He turns his head so that his gaze fixes on James. His best mate's eyes are closed, and as he tries to breathe deeply, his face contorts in pain. There is a small gash on the side of his face that he hasn't bothered to heal, and he seems exhausted. 

"Not out of cowardice," he whispers. 

"But we ran," Sirius states again, as if that is enough to prove his point.

The way he sees it, it is enough. The moment they chose to retreat, so they could tend to their wounded, they lost the battle. The moment they lost this battle, he thinks, they lost the entire fight. No one will stand to fight again. No one, that is, but one. 

From the way James' jaw is set, he can tell that the second his best mate can breathe without the pain in his ribs, he will go out, and he will fight again. Yet somehow Sirius thinks that from all the members that got home alive today, James is the only one who will stand alongside Dumbledore until there is no more blood running through his veins.

"How do you do it?" His voice is louder than he intended, and James starts, spilling some water from the glass in his hand. "Sorry," he breathes, and they both laugh, the sound a bit foreign to the music he is used to hearing these days.

"How do I do what?" James asks after a few more minutes have elapsed.

"After all this, you still want to fight. How can you still believe there will be a happy ever after in this story?"

"I don't," he says plainly, "I don't believe it". Just as silence threatens to envelop them, he adds slowly, "there is no ending to this story."

"What's that supposed to mean, 'no ending to this story'?" Sirius asks, bewildered. "I have a good ending for you – 'and then they all died'!"

He's breathing hard when his little outburst is finished, filling his lungs with small puffs of air. James waits for him to gather himself before he states calmly, "I can choose the ending to my story. I can choose, and I will choose, and that is the only thing that's keeping me moving right now".

"So you have it all planned out?"

"No, that's not what I meant."

"Explain."

He is not thinking, and the word slips. He doesn’t realize it until he catches James smiling at him fondly. For a moment, they are both thrown back to their days at Hogwarts, when every plan started with that same simple command – 'explain'. Only now James is explaining death instead of pranks, and Sirius cringes at the comparison.

"It's like this," James starts, taking his glasses off to wipe them on his shirt. He only manages to get them dirtier, and he gives up, placing them on the table.

"It's like this," he begins again, trying to focus his eyes. "I'm the one telling my story, and so its ending is for me to choose. My parents died, right? I could have ended the story there. I got Lily, right? In two weeks, she will be my wife. I can end the story there. Maybe, some day, we will have a kid. I could end the story there." 

When Sirius is silent, he continues. "This is the story I tell, where I am the hero, the author and the reader. The story you speak about, of death and destruction and Voldemort, that's not anyone's story to tell, and that is why it will never have an ending." 

Again, silence engulfs them. They both shift so they are facing each other on the couch, swirling the water in their glasses.

"Every story has an ending," Sirius says, rising from his seat. "Either the good guy wins, or he dies, and then some other good guy rises to the challenge, and _he_ wins."

"And we are the good guys in this story."

"We are," he retorts, pacing in circles.

"Are we?"

He stops in his tracks and turns to stare at James. The challenge is shining in his eyes, which probably means he has a point, somewhere, behind his moronic questions. His interest in piqued.

"We're fighting for the right cause."

"Says who?"

"We're fighting to end the fighting!"

"So are they."

Sirius opens his mouth to retort, then closes it again. He is speechless, and the triumph shines in James' eyes.

"What is your point, exactly?" he sighs, sitting down with his back to the opposite wall, his arms crossed. "Are you saying that Voldemort is the good guy?"    

"I'm saying it depends on your point of view."

"That hex they hit you with must have twisted your mind," he mutters darkly, and James laughs.

"Let's look at it this way, yeah? Let's say I'm a farmer, and my neighbor tries to rape my wife, and so I go out and seek revenge. I'm the good guy in this story, right?"

"I'd be careful not to give this example to Lily, if I were you."

"Just answer the question, you giant troll," James laughs.

"Yes, you're the good guy, though your wife would have probably hexed you to next week."

"All right," James nods. "Let's say his daughter is married to my son. My son hit her, so her father is now seeking revenge, and that is why he tried to attack my wife. What then?"

"Then you are one hell of a negligent father, not teaching your son better," Sirius retorts, then erupts in a barking laughter.

James throws a pillow at his head.

"Well, tell me, then. Who's the good guy in this story?"

Sirius contemplates this, and then heaves a great sigh.

"I suppose," he starts reluctantly, "that you are both good guys, in your twisted way of telling the story".

"And that's my point!" James declares, the triumph shining in his eyes yet again.

"But it's not the same," Sirius sobers quickly.

"Isn't it? You're only the good guy if someone says you are. Otherwise, you're just someone fighting for something that can be utterly unimportant in everybody else's eyes. Voldemort has followers, doesn't he? To them, he is the good guy."

That is a fact he has never stopped to ponder. As he weighs it against all he knows of the world, something still seems indescribably wrong to him. If there is no good guy in any story, how come the good guy always wins? He says as much to James.

James doesn't even stop to think about it. The answer is on the tip of his tongue.

"That's the thing," he says. "The good guy doesn't always win. The good guy always fights."

"He fights."

"He does."

"Explain."

There's nothing funny about it the second time, only plain curiosity.

"In every story," James begins, "there are at least two heroes, if not more. In their people's eyes, they are both good guys, fighting for the righteous cause. One prevails and one loses, but still they both fight for their cause. If you don't fight, it means you don't believe your cause is worth fighting. If you have no belief, you can't be a good guy."

"And when one prevails and the other loses," Sirius questions, "doesn't the story end?"

James shrugs. "Not really."

"How so?"

He shrugs again. "The hero," he states, "any hero, has too many lives intertwined with his own. The story is not about the hero's life, but the hero's deeds, and so the others will continue telling the story. Let's say, for a moment, that I die. Lily's still alive, you're still alive. You're still fighting, and so the story continues."

"And if," he questions again, determined to make this difficult, "we fight for our cause, and we win, but we all die in the process?"

"There are children, who will tell this story. There are people who will lead a better life, because we fought. And so the story continues. This story has no end."

"You've spent a lot of time thinking about this, haven't you?"

"I have," James agrees.

"And you fight."

"I do. I fight because I want to be the good guy in this story. And the good guy always fights, Sirius, the good guy always fights."

Again, they both fall silent.

So the story goes – to every good, there is an evil. In every book, every movie, every story, you see only one point of view. The knight, who frees the princess, may kill the evil captor who is trying to earn money for a small child at home. In every love triangle, there is the one who doesn't win the girl. Every tale can be told in a thousand different ways, with a thousand different voices, and there is only one thing you can regard as a fact of life. Either way you look at it, the good guy always fights.

      


End file.
